AS WE MOVE further into our study we are discovering
the need for inward discipline. The Beatitudes, we find, are really "hard
sayings"; they are flexing muscles that we have not used for a long time,
and we are not sure whether the struggle is worth it. Especially do we feel
discouraged when we come to the third Beatitude, for while the words say,
"Blessed are the meek," we are semantically conditioned to think, "Blessed
are the weak." The Sunday school hymn couplet went, "Gentle Jesus meek and
mild, look upon this little child," and so we say that we know what meekness
is: it is weakness, softness, gentleness, docility; to be meek is to be something
less than a man, it is to be tame, passive, yielding. It is to be womanly,
as woman is of the weaker sex.

Does not the "meek little man" bring up immediately
the spineless

Page 33

image of Caspar Milquetoast? Does not the "meek little wife" turn
out to be the one who lets her husband "get away with murder"?

We could not be more wrong. The meek are not weak:
they are so strong, says Jesus, that they shall inherit the earth. They are
mightier than any breed the human race has produced from blood and soil.
They control more power than is found in interplanetary space, for they have
access to the Creator. Their battle cry is the song of Deborah against the
Canaanite host under Sisera (Judges 5:20, 31): "They fought from heaven;
the stars in their courses fought against Sisera . . . So let all thine enemies
perish, O Lord." The men who have written history's most impressive pages
have been meek men, and when the latest tyranny to afflict the earth's surface
is removed, it will be meek men who will do it.

Who are these men? What is the trait that Jesus Christ
is describing in them? How can we gain it for ourselves?

Let us move out into full view of the Cross and begin
from there. Calvary presents a grim historical picture of an itinerant carpenter
and teacher being executed on trumped-up charges of sedition and heresy.
To the eye of faith, however, there is evident also the deliberate self-sacrifice
of God's only-begotten Son, who was seeking to obey His Father's will. The
Gospels teach that He laid down His life not because He was trapped by a
false apostle or lynched by wicked men, but because He wished to fulfill
the Scriptures by atoning for the sin of

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the world. "I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how distressed
I am until it is accomplished!" (Luke 12:50) It was His own decision, arrived
at only after much agony of Spirit; He literally "learned obedience by the
things that he suffered." He obeyed, He underwent the discipline, and He
finished the work, and throughout He exhibited
 meekness.

Thus the meek man is not necessarily a passive personality
at all. The meek of whom Jesus speaks are those who have chosen to heed the
voice of God and to place themselves in the center of His will. They have
followed their Savior to the Cross and have put their lives upon the block.
In their obedience they have shown the capacity to take it. Meekness,
says Archbishop Trench, is "an in-wrought grace of the soul, and the exercises
of it are first and chiefly towards God." At the Cross we see the God-centered
quality of meekness. Jesus Christ, who seized the initiative from Herod,
from Pilate and even from John the Baptist, now obeys His Father's will to
the yielding up of His life.

The Cross teaches us a definition of meekness that
will keep us from ever being bothered by this word again: we must be nothing,
that God might be everything. Thus the meek are not simply the jaunty,
as some would attempt to derive from the French translation of our Beatitude:
"Heureux les débonnaires; car ils hériteront de la terre."
Nor are they those who possess a vague "faith in the friendliness of the
universe" (Ligon). First and foremost, the blessed meek are those who have
given over their lives to the Savior that He might live in them.

Page 35

* * * * *
* *

Does the Bible confirm the view of meekness we see
from the Cross?

It is a fairly simple process to take the original
tongues of Scripture and to read back into the Hebrew and Greek an interpretation
of a word or phrase that fits our presuppositions, not to say our prejudices.
It is not so easy to approach the Bible objectively and meekly, and
to ask what it is seeking to teach us. In fact, one of the real hurdles for
the modern Christian is the Bible itself.

Many of us are modest enough in our daily walk, but
our attitude toward the written sources of the Christian faith can become
quite patronizing. The men who wrote the Bible were not moderns, we say,
they were ancients; and how can they teach us? Our intellectual
hauteur exudes when we acquire a little background of Bible history.
We approach the sacred page with condescension; whatever the problem the
text poses, we can "explain" it. How sharply the scalpel of this Beatitude
severs the root of our criticism, for it tells us that our pride has neutralized
its own argument! Only the scientist who sits down before the facts as a
little child learns the secrets of nature; and only the meek have an inheritance
in Scripture. "Receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to
save your souls," advises James. Received any other way, the salt has lost
its savor; the Bible is stripped of its life-giving power.

By comparing Scripture with Scripture we make remarkable
discoveries

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about this Beatitude. Like several others its roots are found in
the Psalms. The very wording of the 37th Psalm is significant:

Those who wait upon the Lord shall inherit the earth. For yet a little
while, and the wicked shall be no more: you will look diligently for his
place, and he will not be there (Psalm 37:9-11).

Further in the Psalms we read:

The meek shall eat and be satisfied (Psalm 22:26).

The meek will he guide in judgment: and the meek will he teach his way
(Psalm 25:9).

The Lord lifts up the meek (Psalm 147:6).

Let them praise his name in the dance: let them sing praises . . . with
the timbrel and harp. For the Lord takes pleasure in his people: he will
beautify the meek with salvation (Psalm 149:3-4).

Aaron and Miriam challenged Moses' authority by asking,
"Hath the Lord indeed spoken only by Moses? Hath he not spoken also by us?"
(Numbers 12:2) The text then relates that "Moses was very meek, above all
the men which were upon the face of the earth." There is no suggestion that
Moses was subservient to his brother or sister; his attitude was rather one
of forbearance, while his humility was directed toward God. To see Moses
meek, see him standing barefoot and wordless before the Lord on the rocks
of Sinai.

When the churches of Galatia are instructed by Paul
(Galatians 6:1)

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how to administer church discipline to a brother found in error,
they are warned, "Restore such a one in the spirit of meekness." Again, Peter
tells the Christians of Asia (1 Peter 3:15) to be "ready always to give an
answer to everyone who asks you the reason for the hope that is in you, yet
do it with meekness and reverence." Both verses suggest that the man of meekness
is under divine authority. He is humble because he realizes that his own
spiritual standing lies in the Grace of God and not in any achievement of
his own. He is meek because he is submitting to the discipline of the hand
of God the Father. Jesus Christ Himself submitted to that discipline, and
left the pattern.

Perhaps one of the clearest illustrations we can find
in Scripture is in Ezekiel. The Hebrew prophet of the exile was given a vision
of the holiness of God which he describes in these words: "I saw as it were
the appearance of fire, and it had brightness round about . . . This was
the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it,
I fell upon my face." Blessed are the meek! Ezekiel, prone, heard a voice
of One that spoke: "And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet,
and I will speak unto thee. And the spirit entered into me when he spake
unto me, and set me upon my feet, that I heard him" (Ezekiel 1:27, 28; 2:1-2).
God did not leave Ezekiel prostrate on the ground, but raised him up that
he might speak boldly to the house of Israel.

Clearly there are set forth in all these passages
characteristics that we do not ordinarily associate with

Page 38

the concept of meekness. Even stronger than the promise of blessings
to come is the note of discipline and teachableness. As Christ Himself expressed
it, "Learn of me, for I am meek."

* * * * *
* *

As a young university graduate I was eager to make
a name for myself, to catch the eye of the nation in some sensational way.
Depression days were propitious for dreaming, and out of my wool-gathering
there emerged a new "beatitude": "Blessed are the colorful, for they shall
make the world their oyster." Richard Halliburton, going round the world
on a shoestring and writing his way to fame, seemed to hold the answer to
life. I yearned to be a "creative personality" who would trip his way in
sprightly fashion with a tip of the hat to anyone, even to God.

One stereotype perhaps above all others that I wished
to avoid was the species known as "Jesus-lover" or
 as we contemptuously referred to them
 the "Christers." Their lives seemed to
be dipped in pastel shades; their words sounded utterly dreary. What could
be more undesirable than to surrender one's vitality and aggressiveness for
a bland "goodiness," to immerse one's individuality in an ocean of piety?
I would have laughed gaily at the fun that J.B. Phillips has since poked
at a hymn which he says is "still sung in certain
circles":1

Page 39

Oh to be nothing, nothing,Only to lie at His feet,A broken and emptied vesselFor the Master's use made meet.

Today I am not so willing to ridicule another man's
faith. Today I am not so sure that the "colorful" are blessed, or that they
are even colorful. When one has stood spiritually destitute alongside blind
and ragged Bartimaeus, pleading with Jesus that he might receive his sight,
and has felt the scales dropping from his eyes, he sees things differently.
To my new eyes the creative personalities are those who radiate the love
of their Lord. The Frank Laubachs, the Eugenia Prices, the Joy Ridderhofs,
the Albert Schweitzers, the Billy Grahams, the "broken and emptied vessels"
whom God has put together and used  in short,
the meek: these are the ones who seem to hold the secret of life. The gallant
Halliburton is lost on a daring but pointless adventure at sea, while the
meek inherit the earth.

Who are the meek? If a man is
willing to take Jesus Christ as his Savior and give up trying to save himself,
he is meek. If he is willing to ascribe full glory to God and to give himself
absolutely none, he is meek. If he is willing to desist trying to pit the
spirit of man against the Spirit of God in contention, he is meek. God tells
the meek man, "You shall be dead to every grade and rank among your fellow
men. You shall seek the lowest place for yourself, and you shall seek it
every day. You shall continue to dwell in it until you would not exchange
it

Page 40

for a throne in heaven. You will rejoice
every time that you are ignored and every time that your name is passed
by."

If the man protests that this
is a bit rough, God replies, "You will stay until it becomes
smooth."

It makes no difference to the
Lord whether a man be an extrovert or an introvert; whether he be aggressive
or retiring; whether his intelligence quotient be high or low. God the Creator
is not looking for creative personalities at all, but for people that He
can use, clay that He can mold, dust that He can breath upon and cause to
live.

* * * * *
* *

To anyone who has read Thucydides,
the present world struggle seems to be a replay of the Peloponnesian War.
America, with her luxuriant culture and her traditions of freedom, wishing
at all costs to preserve her way of life, is Athens redivivus. Soviet
Russia is Sparta with her tight dictatorship, her allies among the have-not
nations, and her total orientation toward combat. It was the fate of Athens
to sink in the midst of her glory. The same fate, Toynbee reminds us, has
overtaken scores of proud civilizations in the epic of
man.

But if Athens was proud, certainly
Sparta was not meek, and history records that the Spartan empire quickly
fell apart. What the outcome of the present battle of titans will be, no
one knows, but what we learn from the Greeks only reinforces the teaching
of our Beatitude. The meekness that inherits the earth is compounded of more
than discipline. It includes an element

Page 41

best described as the fear of the Lord. The
Spartan knew nothing of this fear. His gods were made of plaster; he gave
them the veneration of superstition. And when the clay gods fail to produce,
as Pearl Buck shows us in The Good Earth, man turns on his idolatrous
objects of worship and makes baseballs of them.

The fear of the Lord imparts
a strange power to the believer. There is a suggestion of it in Julia Ward
Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic." The Psalms are full of it. The character
of Martin Luther was formed by it. It created Cromwell's "New Model Army,"
the best-behaved and most invincible force of men the world has ever known.
The iron in the Puritan soul was tempered with it, and the Declaration of
Independence was the result. In the Book of Proverbs we read that "the fear
of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." It could be said that this was the
first statement of the theory of the survival of the fittest, for the God-fearing
man is not easily intimidated by his fellows. It is also another way of saying
that the meek shall inherit the earth.

Quite evidently we are discussing
an element that is not too prominent in the twentieth century, and it is
doubtful whether a crash program of nuclear construction in America is an
adequate substitute. Unless the missile men and muscle men are also meek
men, their labors are doomed: this is the plain teaching of the Word of God.
In Charles Rann Kennedy's drama, The Terrible
Meek,2 the Roman centurion points out the
flaw that eventually destroyed his empire:

Page 42

"We go on building our kingdomsthe kingdoms
of this world. We stretch out our hands, greedy, grasping, tyrannical, to
possess the earth. Domination, power, glory, money, merchandise, luxury,
these are the things we aim at; but what we really gain is pest and famine
. . . dead and death-breathing ghosts that haunt our lives forever . . .
Possess the earth? We have lost it. We never did possess it. We have lost
both earth and ourselves in trying to possess it."

Standing in the shadow of the
Cross, the centurion utters the prophecy of the
Beatitude:

"I tell you, woman, this dead son of yours,
disfigured, shamed, spat upon, has built a kingdom this day that can never
die. The living glory of Him rules it. The earth is His and He made
it . . . Something has happened up here on this hill today to shake all our
kingdoms of blood and fear to the dust . . . The meek, the terrible meek,
the fierce agonizing meek, are about to enter into their
inheritance."

The men of Sparta conquered
and fell. They conquered because they were hardened warriors; they fell because
they were not meek, and only the meek are blessed.

Our little systems have their
day,They have their day and cease to
be.3

Four centuries after Sparta
there stood on Mars Hill in Athens a man named Paul who taught the worship
of the one true God. Had the Athenians learned that lesson in Pericles' day,
who knows what might have happened?

Meekness is like the surface
of the water that is tossed by wind and storm, but when the tumult dies it
invariably returns to its calm reflection of heaven. Meekness is a food soft
to the palate, but it produces sinews of steel. Before God it bends to a
humiliation beyond humility; before man it endures beyond
endurance.

Were we to be sojourners in
ancient Palestine and to discover Abraham, lying on his face before the altar
of an unseen God, would we not question his balance and good judgment? Yet
this same meek Abraham was given an inheritance like the sands of the
seashore.

We learn from Jesus Christ that
there is a meekness that we are to bear toward our brother, and even toward
our enemy, and that it is subject to a daily conditioning by God Himself.
It cannot be trusted to maintain its own level. When I attended the Chaplain
School at Fort Devens during World War II, our instructor at the first session
opened his Bible to Galatians 6:1 and read the words, "Brethren, if a man
be overtaken in a fault, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in the
spirit of meekness; considering yourself, lest you also be tempted." It does
no good to prostrate ourselves before the Lord if we then proceed to be
overbearing and arrogant toward our neighbor. The spirit of meekness is to
be a

Page 44

continuing conditioner in teaching us to
accept reproof and to face criticism objectively.

Perhaps the best way to relate
the Beatitude to our daily lives is to consider driving in traffic. If there
is one place where our century needs to understand the meaning of meekness,
it is behind the wheel of an automobile. The qualities of patience, endurance,
and courtesy make up the difference between life and death; and the Christian
on the highway is God's representative under discipline.

Remember that meekness does
not mean servility and the meek man is not a door mat. Look again at the
Gospel portrait of our Lord. Even in the washing of Peter's feet He maintained
a dignity that transfigured the scene. There was a noble quality to His manliness
that drew young and old. The compassion of His healing ministry flowed not
from weakness but from strength. On the Cross where He took the worst that
man could give Him, He held His head so high that even the admiration of
a Roman legionary was kindled.

Meekness can best be contrasted
with timidity, as well as with aggressiveness by the figure of a door. Three
men wish to go through the door; one is aggressive, one is timid, and one
is meek. The aggressive man does not wait to see whether the door is locked,
but hurls his weight against it and forces the latch. The timid man stands
outside the door, dreading what is on the other side, afraid to try to enter.
The meek man approaches the door and tests the knob to see whether the Lord
has unlatched it. If He has, this man proceeds to walk
in.

It is true in personal relationships
and it is true of our nation

Page 45

as a whole that we are short-rationed in
this quality. God lets us toot our horns all we please, but He never blesses
the result. What Jesus Christ is suggesting in this Beatitude is a measure
long overdue: a revival of meekness. Today the world is weary of boasting;
yet with the resurgence of nationalism there is little relief in prospect.
How welcome would be a prophet who would speak for our time the words of
Isaiah: "Produce your cause, saith the Lord; bring forth your strong reasons,
saith the King of Jacob . . . yea, do good, or do evil, that we may be dismayed,
and behold it together. Behold, you are of nothing, and your work is of nought"
(Isaiah 41:21, 23-24).

No one can lead another closer
to Christ than he stands himself, and no nation can make another nation behave
better than its own example. It is time to pray in our land for a spiritual
awakening that will create a national meekness. We know that when it comes
it will be of God and not of man. It will not be a contrived phenomenon.
It may use the modern mass media and it may not. It may well take the form
Shelton Smith suggested, of "a hard-bitten, psalm-singing band of religious
revivalists." It may come through national suffering and disaster; certainly
it cannot be expected to arrive on pillows of luxury. We can, if we will
strip ourselves of some of the accoutrements of padded living, begin to prepare
for the divine visitation.

In the book of Genesis we are
told that God gave man "dominion . . . over all the earth." Man has not used
that prerogative according to the rules; he has made

Page 46

his own rules, and the bully-boys have usurped
the power wherever they could. now we know that their day is doomed. The
meek shall come into their own, not because they are deserving but because
God has promised them a blessing. No gold stars are passed out in heaven
for meekness, for it is by Grace we are saved. The Beatitude is, from beginning
to end, simply an outpouring of divine Grace through Jesus Christ "so then
it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth
mercy" (Romans 9:16).